Connecting struggles

I12

[I spend] a lot of time networking with people and trying to be inspired by others and also trying to have conversations with people to...share some of my experiences and knowledge...with them and...be an active part of the resistance against capitalism, against the state, against prisons, and to support people who have had…[their] freedom taken away from them by [the] prison society that we live in.

Means and ends

I8

You have to decide before your action, what is my end result? What do I want to achieve? Do I want to engage the masses and try and change them or not? Because if it's not, then hell yeah, do whatever you gotta do. But if you want to play it this way then violence won't play.

The absence of movements

I1

It's the absence of social movements in general that I think is the issue. In the past in the [International Socialists], at least in the incarnation that I was a part of...it was a very clear delineation. You don't take a position above a [union] steward position, that's it, and you don't challenge for [union] president because that leads to all kinds of other stuff and you certainly don't take a staff job by any means. I held to that for a long time. The conditions, I think, are different now. We're not seeing the same opportunities and where they exist [there are] bits of bubbling but not a boiling pot by any means. It's the absence of social movements that has folks like me going into full time jobs that we would never have taken in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Selling people short

I19

Personally I'm really critical of [the belief that] in order to mobilize people [you] have [to] appeal to the lowest common denominator. I think that really sells people short….If we take the G8 organizing [in the] spring [of 2010], I remember being at a meeting and someone said using the slogan ‘stop globalization: another world is possible’ was too political and they had to take ‘stop globalization’ out of the slogan. It's just kind of, like, really? I mean the reality is not that many people are going to come out to this protest anyways, do you have to make it so watered down? It's a watered down slogan as it is but to water it down even more to be just ‘another world is possible’ it just doesn't make any sense to me.

The future, darkly

I18

I'm cynical and pessimistic so I'm just going to tell you my science fiction dystopia. Everything will be privatized, more than fifty per cent of the people will live in total poverty, those who don't will be eking by except for a much smaller top of the pile, [the] twenty-first century aristocracy, who have access to the latest technology to spy on us and control our behaviours. They can censor whatever, they can use this media...to message us in any way they want repetitively to the point where we believe whatever [they] want [us] to believe….[A]ny opponents will be disappeared, concentration camps, the whole nine yards.

The fetish of the local

I5

I don't want to be programmatic about it but I certainly think there's something to the anarchist vision of free federated collectivities that makes a lot of sense to me. But I also agree that that's utopian in some ways, in the sense that I think that we will not solve the crises we currently face by retreating to the local, and imagining the local as a space that we can create a little life boat, and by growing our food locally, and by having very nice community assemblies, and by trying to just retreat to this imagined space of hearth and home that we'll somehow escape what's coming because it's only in building lines of communication and solidarity that we'll do that. I think that that's part of what it would mean to win to me. I'm not interested in creating a world or being part of a project that creates a world that revels in parochialism.

Building commonality

I1

I [found] myself spending more and more of my time on issues I was seeing [around me]....I saw tenant organizing in a similar way that I see union organizing: it's a way to actually build commonality.

Multiple paths

I26

So our strategies are influenced by the [institutional] foothold we have and us wanting to hang onto that. And the strategies of this other [radical] group that might be coming up are in reaction to their perception of us failing at [being radical enough,] so they're going to do it. So their strategies and tactics are going to be different and I think in order for [social change to happen] they both need to be in place.

Activist scenes

I27

One of the things we do a really bad job of is fostering a sense of hope. I know that's kind of cheesy but people come to radical politics because they think it's going to do something and be a legitimate option and we don't make it that. We make it seem like a club, we make it seem like something that people of only a certain ilk can engage in….It should be a part of everyone's day to day experience.

Building solidarity, not conflict

I3

I do believe that non-violent action is more effective as a strategy because the object is to build solidarity rather than conflict and I feel that that is ultimately what we're fighting for. Certainly I feel that non-violent action is more effective just by the very nature of what it is. It's less alienating to people who are largely ignorant of the issues that are being confronted. That it's less intimidating and therefore approachable and it's easier to communicate with people through it.